Proof reading (if you know English well) is a start. Sitting there and writing articles out of suggestions that come up sometimes is another thing. Do a summary similar to the Planet Gentoo round-up for the forums.

I do think that those graphs are much more helpful than the pie charts currently in the GMN._________________“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
---avatar cropped from =AimanStudio---

I like them both. Can't you include both? Like How on one of his bar graphics where it had thestable ones of the total? That can't be represented in pie graphs. So use bars where possible otherwise use pie graphs._________________AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 533MHz RAM | GCC-4.3.2 | Gentoo x86_64 | KDE 4.1.2

I'm really glad that our readers like the GMN, thank you all for your suggestions

The general message about the new charts seems to be that 3D pie-charts, while being nice to look at, don't really convey information effectively. I'll definitely be looking into switching to bar-graphs (similar to what nixnut posted, great job!) in the next issue._________________Anant
http://www.kix.in/

I'd take the data (numbers) from the second png (but no after the comma %-precision), and put the plot of the first png next to it (and let the rightmost number on the axis being the total number of different packages in portage).

Alternating line backgrounds (lightgray/white) would further improve readability of the result.

Sorry to say, but for the third png, I'd leave out the graphs to improve readability: the numbers are easier to compare than the lengths... It's not because it's easy to make a graph that one should. To allow the readers to more easily compare the relative differences, I'd add another column, where the absolute numbers are divided by the maximum.

As per the BIND test results, in all fairness it should be noted that pf (OpenBSD firewall) has sped up a lot between OpenBSD 4.1 (used in the test) and 4.2. Some information on this is here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2007/11/01/whats-new-in-bsd-42.html. Some tests showed a 100% improvement in speed. NetBSD and FreeBSD also use pf, so I would imagine they will also speed up when they get the new pf integrated.

Also, I would like to see the same test conducted with djbdns, but it won't happen. :)

As a statistician I don't like seeing pie-charts, there are any number of reasons not to use them (see for example those cited by Cleveland 1994), but even those who do advocate their usage do not believe that 3D pie-charts should be used (Hunt and Mashhoudy 2008).

The main problem is that visually its harder to distinguish subtle differences in the relative size of slices on a pie-chart. It is far easier to make this distinction in a bar graph.

Adding a third dimension just makes it even harder to distinguish the relative sizes as it obscures a lot of the information behind the third dimension.

Its useful that the raw numbers have been included in the pie-charts in the GMN, as this negates the general problem of relative comparisions, but I generally don't like pie-charts, and hate 3D ones (the main reason for their proliferation is the ubiquity of Excel in many places).

There are of course lots of opinions and various statisticians have discoursed at length, a decent search will turn up lots of hits.

One of the things I enjoy reading in GWN/GMN is the developer of the week/month. Don't know why, I just like to see how people got involved with Gentoo and what their favorite softwares are and so on. Also I enjoy seeing the workspace people use, if there is a picture of it. Also the tips and tricks has been a great thing._________________A bus station is where a bus stops, a train station is where a train stops. On
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Good jobs guys, the Gentoo community deserved a quality newsletter again. Still some things have to be fixed, but I think you will realize in the long run. Keep up the good work._________________Gentoo: Gigabyte: nFORCE 2: nVIDIA GeForce 6600: AMD Athlon XP 3200+
Perspective of a Thinking Human Being

One of the things I enjoy reading in GWN/GMN is the developer of the week/month. Don't know why, I just like to see how people got involved with Gentoo and what their favorite softwares are and so on. Also I enjoy seeing the workspace people use, if there is a picture of it. Also the tips and tricks has been a great thing.

And here is your task. Interview the developers you are interested in and create an article for the GMN.